


Under the Trees

by lynndyre



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Bookverse Elves, First Meetings, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Movieverse Bard and family, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 12:07:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3809806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bard is bitten by a spider, and rescued by an elf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Trees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Knowmefirst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Knowmefirst/gifts).



Bard was dreaming, and the dream was pain. 

The nightmare shifted, fear and pain receding, to be replaced with warmth and contact. Safety. He was holding his daughter in his arms, all his senses full of Sigrid’s soft, perfect child smell. He was being held himself, small again, in his father’s arms. His father pushed back Bard’s hair, and Bard leaned his face into that rough hand, cool against his fevered cheek.

“Come, archer of Men. Wake. Show me your resolve.”

Bard blinked and the world spun in dizzy circles. He groped with his left hand, clutched at the arms holding him and kept his eyes tightly shut. He sucked in air; tasted wild green musk.

“Easy. Do not move overmuch. The spider’s poison is still in your veins.”

When his sight steadied, Bard looked up into the inverted face of an elf. Bard's head and shoulders lay against the elf's legs, and there was a cloak of something soft across his body. His right arm was useless, his fingers numb and his shoulder still burning. He made to speak, but his voice caught, dry, in his throat. The elf thumbed the cork from a small waterskin, and held it to his lips.

"But a little. Slowly."

The drink left his mouth clean, and a breath of honey in his throat. 

"What happened?"

He had been hunting at the forest edge, between the deep trees and the edge of the marshland. He remembered moving deeper into the shade, trying to get a sight line on something moving in the trees above. The spider, dropping from above him, flailing limbs severing his bowstring. Then pain.

“I fear your skill with a bow has served you ill, for the spider bit you with the worser of its venoms, taking you for one of our own archers. We have tended the bite, and much of the poison is drawn away. You will heal.” The elf smiled, an uneven quirk of his lips that brought his face from remote beauty to something reassuringly tangible. “It will merely hurt a great deal.”

Bard snorted, “That I can handle.” The elf clasped his hand, and Bard gripped those fingers tightly. He looked up through the canopy, but no sunlight pierced the thick branches. Upside down, as he tilted his head back, the elf's hair fell about both their faces, yellow and silken soft where it brushed Bard's cheek. The contact made him shiver.

But the shivering did not abate, and Bard shuddered, limbs seizing, and the arms around him tightened apace, holding him still though his heels dug at the ground. Long fingers folded his hands together and laced through them, holding fast as Bard rode out the pain. Bard's strength was born from years of drawing a longbow and navigating the pull of the river. The elf’s strength was something greater.

The pain retreated then, for a little, and was at its ebb when other woodelves came, dropping from the trees to report in their own tongue, which washed over Bard’s ears strangely for all its beauty. The elf holding Bard replied in the same language, and when the others had departed, Bard looked up to his rescuer in inquiry.

“They report the spiders of this nest are all slain, and an egg sac has been destroyed. I have sent them to search out others, for I hold it suspect that the creatures hunt so near the forest border in these numbers.”

The thought of spider eggs, like the little white balls under the woodpile, hatching hundreds and hundreds of poisonous offspring that would grow to monstrous size—Bard searched for other thoughts. The pain was rising once more.

“Is it true you make silk -- of their webs?”

“Nay, there is a darkness in them that would prove unwholesome to any who wore such a garment. The silk we make is woven from the cocoons of infant moths.”

Poisonous heat pulsated through his shoulder, lancing into his chest and down his arm. He gritted his teeth, and did not cry out, though his eyes grew wet and all his muscles tense. 

"You will mend easier if your body can rest without pain. Permit that I send you to sleep."

The elf's hands were more solid than the forest floor, which rolled beneath him like an unsteady boat. "You can do that?" 

"I can."

"Then yes. Thank you." 

Long fingers touched his face, and all the lights went out.

When Bard woke again, it was from dreams that blurred with happiness, and someone was washing his face. Salt tracks had marked his temples, and the elf wiped them away with wetted fingers, cleansing the salt from his eyelashes and washing cool and clean over his eyelids. He blinked his eyes clear.

"Your hands are more gentle than my wife's."

In the branches above, one of the other woodelves burst into merry laughter, and the elf frowned upwards as titters echoed from all around them.

Bard flushed, having not expected the company. “I did not intend mockery. It is only- it is disarming to feel so well cared for.” His body ached, but no longer with the force of true pain, and its absence was an exhilarating freedom.

The elf shot one last look into the trees, and his lips curled into a smile. "There are worse things than being found ...caring.”

He pulled Bard to his feet and steadied him with deceptive ease. The cloak that had covered Bard’s body the elf swept up and around his own shoulders; it draped his form in brown and grey and green, dappled like light between the leaves. From farther off, he would have been only part of the forest. Bard's bow was returned to his hand, unstrung but undamaged, and a chestnut-haired archer tucked a spare bowstring into Bard's palm with a grin. "The spiders think you're one of us! We shall have to keep you equipped." Bard thanked her with the very little Elvish he knew, and even the blond elf chuckled.

The edge of the trees was closer than Bard had imagined, yet far enough that he knew he would have foundered under the dark branches. As they emerged onto the riverbanks within sight of his boat, still moored fast, and undamaged, Bard let out his breath in relief.

“Thank you, my friend, and to your patrol. I’m grateful for your aid, and doubly grateful to be alive to thank you for it.”

“You are our allies, man of the Lake, and we prefer to keep you alive." His eyes cut sideways, and that little smile reappeared. "We've no one else to trade with, after all.” 

Bard laughed outright, and behind them in the trees he heard the other elves laughing too, and a call of ‘Yes, send more wine!” His rescuer only smiled, and touched Bard’s shoulder.

“Go safely.”

Bard bent to loosen the rope tying up the boat, but when he rose, the shoreline was empty, and the trees held only laughing echoes. Breath tight in his chest, he tossed the rope onboard, and stepped onto the deck. And there, cleaned and dressed, was a young buck, and a cloth bag of rich forest mushrooms.

Bard turned the prow of his little ship toward home, but his eyes watched the forest edge until it was out of sight.


End file.
